Experience Psychology

Do you want your students to just take psychology or to experience psychology?

Experience Psychology is a complete learning system that empowers students to personally, critically, and actively experience the impact of psychology in everyday life. Experience Psychology is about, well, experience—our own behaviors; our relationships at home and in our communities, in school and at work; and our interactions in different learning environments. Grounded in meaningful real-world contexts, Experience Psychology’s contemporary examples, personalized author notes, and applied exercises speak directly to students, allowing them to engage with psychology and to learn verbally, visually, and experientially—by reading, seeing, and doing. With the Experience Psychology learning system, students do not just “take” psychology but actively experience it.

Experience a Personalized Approach How many students think they know everything about introductory psychology but struggle on the first exam? LearnSmart, McGraw-Hill’s adaptive learning system, pinpoints students’ metacognitive abilities and limitations, identifying what they know—and more importantly, what they don’t know. Using Bloom’s Taxonomy and a highly sophisticated “smart” algorithm, LearnSmart creates a personalized, customized study plan that’s unique to each individual student’s demonstrated needs. With virtually no administrative overhead, instructors using LearnSmart are reporting an increase in student performance by a letter-grade or more. Throughout Experience Psychology, students find a wealth of personal pedagogical “asides” directly from Laura King to guide their understanding and stimulate their interest as they read. Some of these helpful notes highlight crucial terms and concepts; others prompt students to think critically about the complexities of the issues; other notes encourage students to apply what they have learned to their prior reading or to a new situation. These mini-conversations between author and students help develop analytical skills for students to carry and apply well beyond their course.

Experience an Emphasis on Critical Thinking Experience Psychology stimulates critical reflection and analysis. Challenge Your Thinking sidebar features involve students in debates relevant to findings from contemporary psychological research. Thought-provoking questions encourage examination of the evidence on both sides of a debate or issue. Also oriented toward critical thought are the text’s Intersection selections. Showcasing studies in different areas of psychological research that are being conducted on the same topic, the Intersections shed light on the links between, and the reciprocal influences of, this exciting work, and they raise provocative questions for student reflection and class discussion.

The new Psychological Inquiry feature encourages and guides analysis and interpretation of figures and photos by embedding a range critical thinking questions in selective captions. To help students master challenging concepts, Experience Psychology also includes a special section, “Touring the Brain and Nervous System,” featuring detailed, full-color transparency overlays of important figures. Conceived and developed with the input of an expert in each specific area, the overlays offer hands-on practice in grasping key biological structures and processes that are essential to success in the course. A feature called Apply It to Our World links the subject matter of the transparency overlays to common real-life situations such as the fear of spiders. On-page assessment questions and answers, as well as critical thinking questions, accompany each figure.

Experience an Emphasis on Active Engagement With the new Experience It! feature, students can use their mobile devices to practice and master key concepts wherever and whenever they choose. By snapping easily located QR codes, students gain access to videos, Concept Clips, and related news articles, for a highly portable, rich, and immersive experience that powerfully reinforces the chapter reading. Through Do It!, a series of brief, reoccurring sidebar activities linked to the text reading, students get an opportunity to test their assumptions and learn through hands-on exploration and discovery. Reinforcing that the science of psychology requires active participation, Do It! selections include, for example, an exercise on conducting an informal survey to observe and classify behaviors in a public setting, as well as an activity guiding students on how to research a “happiness gene.” Such exercises provide students with a vibrant and involving experience that gets them thinking as psychologists do. Experience Psychology helps students to perform to their maximum potential in and out of the classroom, fully engaging them in the content and experiences that comprise the world’s most popular undergraduate major.